


Thunder Road

by ishafel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-08
Updated: 2011-02-08
Packaged: 2017-10-15 12:42:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/160924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are things Dean never knew how to say.  AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thunder Road

Sam's seventeen. The girl's sixteen. Dad's not wrong, when he hands Dean two thousand dollars in cash and orders Dean to take her to Sioux Falls and take care of things.

He's not right, either. The girl cries the whole way, looking out the window, harsh, gulping sobs that Dean pretends he can't hear. She's pretty, smart. She has a shot at college, a life outside South Dakota. But when Dean parks the car outside the clinic, she's out like a shot, running away. Dean chases her, catches her by the wrist, and she screams at him to let her go. Screams at him not not kill her baby. Dean drags her down the street to the Denny's, pushes her into a booth, slams himself down across from her. Her face is swollen and red from crying, and her nose is running. What the hell, he asks her. What do you even want?

She wants to have her baby, but if he takes her home her father will kill her, and his father will kill him and Sam, in that order. She's hysterical, crazy, but she's right about one thing. He can't make her have an abortion. Eventually he gives her the money Dad gave him, plus everything in his wallet and the five hundred he keeps in the car, stashed in the wheel well in the Impala's trunk. It's more money than he's ever had in his life, but it's not nearly enough. He gives her the post office box numbers in Lincoln and Kansas City and he leaves her on the steps of the Y and drives home.

They move to Louisiana the next day, and Dad never asks about the girl again. Three months later Sam leaves for Stanford, and it's like a door closes. But she writes. She writes to Dean: long, rambling letters on white lined paper, in looping teenage girl handwriting, a first-hand account of her pregnancy. He saves them like he saved the pictures Sam drew, his report cards and research papers and school pictures.

He sends her postcards, when he can; sometimes he sends her money, cash in envelopes borrowed from hotel rooms, never the same town twice. He thinks about her, sometimes, after Dad leaves and he's alone. She says she's found a job as a waitress, found an apartment, made a life. He believes her because he wants to believe her, because she's the only good thing left in his life.

She has the baby six weeks early and he drives from east Texas to South Dakota, says yes when she asks to put his name on the birth certificate. She calls the baby Hayley, which he hates, and then Winchester, which he doesn't. She's a kid, but she's a good mother. He visits a lot, when he can make the time, or sometimes steal the time. It's in the middle of the country, more or less: he passes through. Dad suspects, maybe, but he never says. Sam doesn't call, doesn't write, doesn't answer the door when Dean stops by.

Dean changes diapers when he's there, babysits when he can. He keeps sending money, and now he sends gift cards, baby clothes, toys. The night she's six months old, he spends camped out on the floor of the bedroom, trying to protect both girls, and knowing that if the demon comes there's nothing he can do but die for them. Hayley doesn't call him Daddy, when she learns to talk, but she doesn't say it to anyone else, either. The letters come as regularly as they ever did. Hayley walks, she talks, and then she runs and sings and draws in crayons on the apartment's dirty white walls. Her father's a junior in college, living with a beautiful woman Dean's never met, and neither of them know she exists, ever existed.

When Hayley's five Dean takes her out to the middle of nowhere, puts the smallest gun he can find in her hand, and teaches her to shoot at bottles. She's a natural, from the minute her chubby little hands with their sparkly pink nails close around the grip of the pistol. She's already a better shot than her father, and he daydreams about taking her to meet John Winchester, pretending she's his and not Sam's. She looks like a Winchester: Sam's deadly seriousness, but his own fairer coloring and green eyes, and Dad's determined chin.

She likes the gun, but she thinks it's a game. He hates to do it, but he knows he has to: the third time they have target practice, he points a rabbit out to her, crouched quivering at the treeline, and then he shoots it. Hayley's sick and then she cries, but he knows she learned, same as he did when Dad did it to him. You don't draw a gun unless you mean to use it, and you'd better be prepared for the consequences.

And then his father disappears, and Sam's girlfriend dies, and all he can do is call and say something's come up. Sometimes there are two or three letters in the post office box, some of them in Hayley's crooked handwriting. He doesn't show them to Sam. He doesn't say anything about it. And then Dad dies and the world falls apart.

They're outside Boston when he gets the call. Dean drives straight through, Sam asleep, slouched in the seat beside him, halfway across the country. Dean doesn't explain where they're going, or why. Missy's dead when he gets there, almost three days dead, and Hayley throws herself at him. "Daddy," she says, and her arms go around his neck. He hasn't seen her in almost a year, but she looks the same, smells the same. He hugs her back, and when he says, "I'm here," he doesn't look at Sam.


End file.
